This essay examines the concepts of death and temporal experience in post-revolutionary France through an analysis of the anonymous Portrait of an Artist in his Studio (ca. 1824). I argue that the Portrait is a posthumous homage to Theodore Gericault in the wake of his death in 1824, and that thinking about death is posited as crucial to the Portrait's concept of artistic identity. My thesis is the first comprehensive historical and theoretical analysis of the Portrait, and reinterprets the Portrait's meaning by demonstrating the image's relationship with death and the temporal structures of post-revolutionary France. By combining these methodologies, a fuller picture of the Portrait's underlying cultural and social features with both Romanticism and more broadly post-revolutionary France is made.

My first chapter will resituate the Portrait in the cultural milieu of Romantic artistic circles in early 1820's Paris. I argue that the Portrait is produced in the years immediately following Gericault's death in 1824 amidst other paintings and drawings which commemorated the late artist. I explore this small but obsessive community of Romantic artists and their treatment of Gericault as a martyr as an insight into Romantic identity. At this early point in the construction of "Romanticism, " the death of Gericault is an important event for French Romantic painters' relationship with death. The dramatic religiosity and melancholy employed within the Portrait (and other cult images of Gericault) provide a foundation to understand the visual characteristics of the Romantic artist himself. The second chapter will analyze the painting's relationship to death through a semiotic analysis. As a quite literal rumination on the death of an author, the Portrait lends itself to a semiotic reading. In the Portrait , the indexical sign pervades the scene: death masks, plaster casts, shadows and skulls neatly come together in one image. The numerous indexical signs in the Portrait calls attention to the objects in the room, their importance, and what it means to put them in conversation with each other. The meaning of the indexical sign, as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce, is created through the temporal relationship between the sign and the object it stands for. Finally, I imbed my semiotic analysis of the Portrait into a consideration of the temporal structure of post-revolutionary France. I argue that the indexical sign in the Portrait demonstrates death's relationship with the modern relationship to time that Peter Fritzsche has defined as the "historical consciousness."